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Topic: Uh.. ya, don't do that.... (Read 565856 times)

When using the immersion blender, do not point it toward your face if it's still plugged in. You will absolutely bump the "high" button, and you will need to wash your face, your glasses, change your shirt, and clean the floor.

When using the immersion blender, do not point it toward your face if it's still plugged in. You will absolutely bump the "high" button, and you will need to wash your face, your glasses, change your shirt, and clean the floor.

And probably the ceiling too. Please don't ask how I know this.

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Meditate. Live purely. Quiet the mind. Do your work with mastery. Like the moon, come out from behind the clouds! Shine. ---Gautama Buddah

If you try out an ill-constructed holder for two tea candles, where one is positioned right underneath the other, heating up the wax of the upper candle to the point where it catches fire:

Do NOT forget that this is basically a grease fire. Spraying water on it will not put it out, but cause quite a big spurt of flame. You will scream like a damsel in distress from a superhero movie.

On a related note, when you've got a wax bead candle burning in a glass jar, dousing the entire thing under cold water won't help. The tiny flame will absoultely be snuffed, but the glass will be heat-shocked and shatter into a million tiny little shards.

You want to talk nasty? Mom used to use baby oil in the bath, every night. EVERY NIGHT. And then wondered why the drains were always $#&*.

Okay, wait, question time. Sorry if this is a stupid question...

I've never dumped grease down the drain. I always put it in some old container (usually the can from the tomato sauce that I used in the spaghetti sauce for which I browned the meat...) and throw it in the trash.

But baby oil? I keep finding recipes for "make your own sugar scrub" and all of them use oil! Olive oil, grapeseed oil, baby oil if you're cheap, jojoba oil, etc.

Midnight Kitty, can you weigh in? Obviously, these are oils which are the O in FOG. There's really no way to use these without getting it down the drain. Is there? Do I...do I have to quit using my awesome new thing?

Yes, baby oil is oil, the middle "o" in FOG. In layman's terms, think of oil as light weight grease. It isn't as viscous (thick & sticky) as grease, but it gums the pipes up nearly as well. The amount of oil as well as what it is mixed with makes a difference. When Mom pours baby oil in the bath, you can see the film when the tub is emptied. Well, it leaves that gunky film all the way down. A small amount occasionally won't clog the drain, but a lot of oil frequently poured down the drain will, eventually, clog the drain.

Are these scrubs used in the bath water? Can you scrub down in the tub or stall, then remove most of the scrub with a paper towel before you rinse off? That would minimize the amount that went down the drain. I think the "salts" dissolve in water anyway, so you wouldn't be "scrubbing" with salt in the bath.

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"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

Is there any cleaning product one can use to minimize this oil down the pipes problem? (like white vinegar maybe? that stuff is supposed to be miraculous so...)My mother uses a kind of oily body soap that I quite like when I'm at her place, so I was pondering on getting myself a bottle too, but the pipes here are already in a pretty bad shape so this is making me reconsider it!

When using a pill splitter to break your daughter's Very Tiny pills, be careful of the blade on the pill splitter. It is very thin, and very sharp. Bumping your pinkie finger against it will create a cut that stings worse than a paper cut, and bleeds all over the place. The bleeding is a hindrance to medicine preparations.

Sometimes that hindrance just seems to add insult to injury. Some days I can deal with the injury, but then I get really annoyed when I can't just get on with what I was doing because I am bleeding all over the place. So annoying.

Do not for any reason leave Mr. Crochet Addict alone with anything major that is suspected of being broken. He will try to fix it, in interesting ways, that are at least funny after the fact. Two incidents come to mind- the Toilet Disaster, and the Furnace Incident.

The Toilet Disaster- The flapper on the toilet needed replaced. We bought a replacement kit, and my dad explained over the phone what to do. Sounded easy, so I told Mr. CA that we would work on that after I got off work. Upon returning from work, I was greeted by 2 very frightened and confused cats, and a flurry of profanity coming from the bathroom. As I approached the bathroom, on the hallway floor, I encountered the lid of the toilet tank, followed by a trail of all of the innards of the toilet tank, and finally, and most alarmingly, the actual toilet tank itself. Yes, Mr. CA had managed to take the toilet, down to the bowl, apart. The profanity was caused by him not being able to put it back together. Panicking, I decided to ask the neighbors for a reference for a good plumber. Fortunately, the same neighbor used to be a plumber, so he came over, and after he finished laughing, was able to put things to rights again.

The Furnace Incident- Our house was built in the 1920s, and the furnace was originally a woodburner, converted into natural gas some time later. One day, it stopped working. Mr. CA was off that day, I worked, and I asked him to call a repairman to look things over. I called home on my lunch break and Mr. CA assured me that he had corrected the matter. The Toilet Disaster came to mind, and I felt rather uneasy. However, the furnace had instructions for ignition on it, so I hoped that Mr. CA used those. Upon returning home, I noticed the house was rather chilly. Mr. CA offered to show me how he was fixing the furnace. So, he grabbed some newspaper, wadded it up, picked up a lighter, and headed toward the basement. Sweet monkey fritters, I thought. He's been hurling flaming objects into the natural gas furnace all day. I tried to explain why this was a Bad Idea, but Mr. CA felt that since it worked fine all day, to continue with his current method. So, I grabbed the cats, who for some reason had followed us into the basement, and ran upstairs. Suddenly, what sounded like a sonic boom issued from the basement. Mr. CA teleported into the living room instantly afterward, and concernedly asked if his facial hair was still attached. Seems when he had thrown the flaming newspaper into the furnace, as I predicted, he was greeted with a rather impressive, but short-lived, fireball. At this point, I figured it would be a good idea for me to look things over. A quick inspection of the control panel showed that the furnace had somehow been turned off. Mr. CA said that he'd swept it with a broom earlier the previous day. He must have bumped the switch. I followed the ignition instructions and we had lovely, non-explody heat. I dearly love Mr. CA, and for his safety, he is no longer permitted to attempt to fix things without supervision.

A friend had gotten a bunch of video games on a disc when he was in Japan. He loaned them to another friend with no comments. Most of them were PG type, but some of them were....NOT!!!!!!!!! First friend learned several important lessons:

1) Do not play unknown video games on big screen TV when your children are home.2) Do not play said video games with your elementary age girls on the couch beside you.3) Do not let your spouse catch you playing these video games with your children in the room.

Video games involved extremely graphic Japanese tentacle p0rn. Friend came in to work and started spewing out almost unintelligible profanity at the friend who gave him the games. Everyone else was ROFL at the rather interesting explosion of profanity.

The guy who borrowed the games should have really known better. The game loaner was a guy with rather...interesting...taste in entertainment.

If you hear something that sounds kind of...solid...clunking around in your washing machine right after you start the cycle, don't just shrug your shoulders and figure it's no big deal and it will resolve itself.

Because that clunking sound will probably end up being something that you care about but accidentally left in your pants pocket. Like the tube of lipstick that you sometimes carry around so you can more easily reapply it.

Most likely, you'll get to spend several worrying minutes trying to find a time during the wash cycle where the machine actually lets you open the door so that you can dig around in the cold, heavy, sopping wet, still-slightly-soapy clothes and find the darned tube of lipstick.

This was not a disaster this morning because:a) I habitually wash all of my clothes in only cold water (so no melty tubes of lipstick to smear all over my clothes, including the white shirt that's in this load),

b) I only ever keep my lipstick in either my purse or my pocket, so I was able to determine that it was actually in there while I was still trying to get the washing machine open, and

c) the lipstick tube itself is apparently water resistant enough that there were only tiny beads of water on the inside, and it looks like I can still use it.

But my goodness was it dumb to not go through the whole check-the-machine drill before the clothes were sopping and there was any soap involved.

This is actually how my first cell phone died. I wasn't used to having one and thus hadn't checked my pockets for it when I did the load. When I took it out of the machine, dripping wet, it gave a few shudders and passed away. RIP brand-of-phone-that's-not-even-on-the-market-anymore-because-I'm-old...